Welcome to Kevin McMullin

We have a tradition in our department to ask students to conduct a brief ‘interview’ with new profs, to learn a bit more about them. Kevin has joined our department this semester, and Claire Lesage and Myriam Lapierre had a chance to chat to him. This is what we have found out:

Kevin McMullin is the new phonologist in our department. He is originally from Saint John’s, New Brunswick. Kevin did his BA in Linguistics and Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia in January 2016.

Kevin’s dissertation discusses the learnability of long-distance phonotactic dependencies. He designed an artificial language learning experiment to investigate how people learn and generalize phonological rules. Kevin argues that current models of learnability are problematic for models of learning from a general cognitive perspective and from a formal computational perspective. Settling into Ottawa, Kevin has connected his research to teaching a unique graduate course which discusses formal models of language learnability.

What you didn’t know about Kevin is that he is a world-renowned unicycling champion. Kevin placed 2nd in the 2006 world championship in the Street Freestyle Competition in Langenthal & Berne, Switzerland.